Kindle Unlimited

Back in June I wrote a post where I outlined the pros and cons of Kindle Select, a program where you’re required to make a book exclusive to Amazon for 90 days in exchange for certain perks.

One of those “perks” is that the book we enroll in KDP Select is also placed into Kindle Unlimited. Kindle Unlimited is a subscription-based service where readers pay a flat monthly fee for the ability to read the books in KU without paying anything additional for them. Authors whose books are in KU are paid based on how many pages of their books are read. The per-page payout varies per month, and Amazon announces what it will be on the 15th day of the following month. (In other words, you find out on March 15 what the payout will be for page reads from February.) Whether or not an author chooses to enroll some or all of their books in KDP Select is a personal choice and should be based both on what’s working now and on what our overall career goals are. I can’t tell you what to do because there’s no one right answer in this business.

What I can tell you is that the reason my pen name’s books are all still in KDP Select is Kindle Unlimited.

So what I wanted to do this month is share some of the data I’ve been able to collect about my page reads compared to my sales and how borrows have influenced my sales’ rank in order to explain why—for me—Kindle Unlimited is worth being exclusive to Amazon.